Pants-of-dog wrote:There is no lack of studies to corroborate the claim in the OP:
Abstract
The popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages and employment opportunities of the native-born population of the receiving country is not supported by the empirical evidence. A 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants in the population reduces native wages by 0-1 percent. Even those natives who are the closest substitutes with immigrant labor do not suffer significantly as a result of increased immigration. There is no evidence of economically significant reductions in native employment. The impact on natives' per capita income growth depends crucially on the immigrants' human capital levels.
Link to abstract: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.9.2.23
Link to full article: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.2.23
Abstract
This paper calculates the effects of immigration on the wages of native US workers of various skill levels in two steps. In the first step we use labor demand functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution across different groups of workers. Second, we use the underlying production structure and the estimated elasticities to calculate the total wage effects of immigration in the long run. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine own-group effects with cross-group effects in order to obtain the total wage effects for each native group. In order to obtain a parsimonious representation of elasticities that can be estimated with available data, we adopt alternative nested-CES models and let the data select the preferred specification. New to this paper is the estimate of the substitutability between natives and immigrants of similar education and experience levels. In the data-preferred model, there is a small but significant degree of imperfect substitutability between natives and immigrants which, when combined with the other estimated elasticities, implies that in the period from 1990 to 2006 immigration had a small effect on the wages of native workers with no high school degree (between 0.6% and +1.7%). It also had a small positive effect on average native wages (+0.6%) and a substantial negative effect (−6.7%) on wages of previous immigrants in the long run.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 052.x/full
There's also no lack of studies which don't corroborate the OP claim. Your second cite references several and purports to address them.
The thing is.. this is economics literature and both camps present
models, not direct measurements (which, tbf, are nigh impossible). What the models spit out - the alleged "calculations" - are only as good as the assumptions. The first paper admits that in what it calls a "closed economy", cheap immigrant labour depresses wages. But it assumes an "open" economy where :
(1)
"In the most commonly employed open economy model, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, the results are quite different. If technology is assumed to be the same across countries, trade will be driven by factor endowments, and factor price equalization occurs if countries' factor endowments are not too different. In this situation, immigration will cause production of the more labor-intensive good to increase, but factor prices will remain unchanged. In an open economy, the adjustment may be thought of as occurring through the labor embodied in traded goods: immigration will cause the country to compensate by exporting more (or importing less) labor as embodied in goods."(2)
"since the greater supply of unskilled labor means that optimal output is now higher, this scale effect will induce employers to use more of all inputs." Need I go on? (1) basically assumes away cheap(er) immigrant labour with a lot of euphemisms, and (2) assumes the so-called "competitive model" where price-taking firms can sell any additional output at prevailing market prices without affecting them (most people think of "competitive firms" as firms which must undercut each other to gain market share. Economists mean nearly the opposite by it)
The second "study" reads like a caricature of economics literature and is too opaque to address here. Neither are necessarily wrong, but neither disprove claims to the contrary.
Meanwhile, the left will complain that the right is bringing in immigrants, the right will complain that the left is doing it.
And both will ignore the fact that the immigrants themselves are doing it, and they are doing it because of global inequality.
I totally agree.